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fHE SOUTHERN STATES HARDENED UNTIL 


RUINED. 


A 




SERMON 




PREACHED 




SALEM ON FAST 


DAY, 


April 13th, 18G5. 




BY 




ROBERT C. MILLS 


> 


Pastor of the First Baptist Church. 







:fc)ublisJ)t& bg ftrqurst. 



BOSTON: 
J. M. HEWES, PRINTER, 65 CORNHILL 

1865. 



THE SOUTHERN STATES HARDENED UNTIL RUINED. 



SERMON 



PREACHED 



IN SALEM ON FAST DAY, 

^Vpril 13th, 1865. 

BY 

ROBERT C. MILLS, 

Pastor of the First Baptist Church. 



^hibltsljctf lig Bequest. 



BOSTON: 

J. M. HEWES, PRINTER, 65 CORNHILL, 

1865. 



,5 
■M4.5 



SEEM ON. 



Exodus lO : SO. 

« But the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart, so That he would 
not let the children of israel go." 

On the second Sabbath of April, 1861, at two o'clock 
in the afternoon, "the evacuation of Fort Sumter 
was completed." Such was the despatch which the 
Charleston correspondent of a New York daily journal 
sent by the telegraph. Within about an hour of the 
same time, on the afternoon of the second Sabbath in 
April, 1865, the Commander in Chief of the army of 
the "Confederate States" surrendered, with all the 
forces under his immediate command, to the Lieut. 
General of our army. On the same day, the principal 
fort defending Mobile, the last of the important " Con- 
federate" ports, was also surrendered to our forces. 
Major Anderson lowered the flag of our country with 
a salute of fifty guns, as if to promise its defence, the 
vindication of its honor, and its restoration. He is 
now at Fort Sumter, with the same flag, to raise it 
again to-morrow, on the fourth anniversary of its re- 
moval. The providence of God has, however, ordered 
the other more grand and solemn commemoration of 
the event, which took place, by anticipation, on the 



same day of the week, without waiting for the same 
day of the month on which the evacuation occurred. 

Our Governor has appointed this for a day of Fast- 
ing, Humiliation and Prayer. But God has put songs 
and gladness in our hearts. If the Jews could not 
sing the Lord's song in a strange land, and in cap- 
tivity, neither can we spend the time in lamentation, 
even though our sins are many and great, when He 
has "triumphed gloriously" for us, and He has made 
us all feel that, " It is the Lord's doing, and it is mar- 
vellous in our eyes." 

Yet, to be very greatly blessed, sometimes most 
thoroughly reminds us of our unworthiness, and " the 
goodness of God leads us to repentance." To-day, we 
may well feel that deliverance, and the end of our con- 
flict, are what we do not deserve ; but the trial which 
we have so long endured is more nearly what we actu- 
ally merit from our holy and just Lord. And the 
whole course of events has been making the impres- 
sion both general and deep, that " God has risen up 
to judgment" in these affairs of ours ; and acted with 
us as He has before done with other nations, and ac- 
cording to the expectations which His Word excites. 

As we look on the desolate and vanquished Southern 
States, it does now seem as if they had been hardened 
to pursue the course of self-destruction. They have 
effected their own complete ruin in almost every re- 
spect, but especially in regard to that for which they 
had for years contended with us, which had corrupted 
them politically, socially and religiously, and for which 
they took up arms against their own country and its 
government, and plunged us into our long and bitter 
civil war. They thus repeat, while they illustrate, the 



hardening of Pharaoh's heart under similar circum- 
stances. 

I. The illustration ivhich the Southern States furnish of 
the hardening of the heart of the King of Egypt, is the first 
point ivhich tue would noiv consider. 

Many find difficulties with the Scriptural record in 
respect to Pharaoh. It seems to them to teach, that 
God set about the direct hardening of his heart, so as 
to prevent him from relenting and treating the Jews 
as he was commanded. And when God said, that He 
had for this purpose raised him up, to show in him His 
power, and that His name might be declared through- 
out all the earth, Exocl. 9 : 16, it has seemed to them 
as if Pharaoh could not have taken a different course 
from the one which he pursued. 

This was not the case, but God knew that he would 
not obey Him ; and because the reason of this was 
his own wickedness, God determined that it was not 
best to contend with his opposition with any other 
than the special and suitable means which Moses em- 
ployed by His direction. He purposed, notwithstand- 
ing Pharaoh's opposition, to free His people, and to 
punish the king also, for his sinful oppression, and dis- 
obedience to His command to let them go out from 
bondage. Under such circumstances, it may be that 
God, as a judgment, preferred to do what He knew 
could only harden Pharaoh, although it should have 
subdued and changed him. The result was Pharaoh's 
own work, indeed ; but God let the matter take this 
course, and chose it, because He felt that Pharaoh 
should be punished by being allowed to have his own 
way, to persist in his disobedience, until it had ruined 



him, at the same time, and by the very means, by which 
the Israelites also were set free. Thus, by the king's 
persisting in his own course and being punished, while 
the Israelites were delivered, God was honored. It 
now seems that God has dealt with the rebels among 
us in the same way as He dealt with the king of 
Egypt. One illustrates the other ; and as we now, 
with calmness, look over the course of the rebels, we 
see that they have had their hearts hardened to pros- 
ecute their own designs until they have placed them- 
selves where they now stand. They have been stout 
and strong in their success, until they have carried out 
their plans to their own utter confusion and undoing. 
It seems like a marked judgment of God. And this 
appears to be what God means by hardening a man's 
heart, viz., to allow him success in resisting or overcom- 
ing every thing which opposes his inclination, or plans, 
until in following them he ruins himself. This a na- 
tion may do as well as an individual. This Pharaoh 
did ; and now our Southern States have done the same 
thing once more. 

II. Let us now review some of the steps by which the 
South has been enabled and emboldened to go on in its 
chosen ivay until it has brought itself into its present 
condition. 

The Southern States made their own choice. That 
was wrong, both morally and politically. But God 
permitted them to find encouragement and success in 
the course which they had chosen. This was needed 
to undo them ; and it has ended in this result. What- 
ever steps they considered necessary to accomplish 
their purposes, they were permitted to take, but only 



to render their failure in them and their ruin more 

signal. 

One step was, the corruption of sentiment among 
themselves, in respect to the moral character of sla- 
very. Slavery could not be permanent any where 
with the views which the Southern States generally, 
in common with the rest of the country, held in oppo- 
sition to it, until within the present generation. And 
those views forbade them to hold, or claim, or gam, 
any position but one for which they must apologize to 
the world, and which must keep them in relative infe- 
riority and weakness among the States of the Union. 

It is only about twenty-five years, since one of the 
prominent Presbyterian clergymen of South Carolina 
expressed to Dr. Beecher, in a letter complaining of 
the conduct of abolitionists, the sentiments common, 
even then, at the South, as well as fifty and a hundred 
years ago. His language was :— « I have been a slave- 
holder from my youth, and yet I detest it as the politi- 
cal and domestic curse of our Southern country." 
Such views, of course, would not permit the South to 
perpetuate and widen the field of human bondage. 
But the desire to do this grew and extended among 
the leading men of that section of our country, espe- 
cially through the influence of John C. Calhoun. Con- 
sequently, such ideas as this clergyman expressed 
began to be opposed, and with such success, that, at 
last, even the pulpit fully and boldly contended for 
slavery, as not only desirable, but even morally right, 
and required as well as sanctioned by Christianity. 
Thus the whole moral tone of the South became cor- 
rupt. Success crowned this necessary step in the 
direction of establishing and perpetuating the bondage 



8 

of men. This gave a firmness to its throne at home 
which it had not previously enjoyed, and which yet it 
required to secure its desired place, first, at home, and 
then, in the nation. This success hardened the hearts 
of the South in respect to maintaining and perpetu- 
ating slavery. 

In the next place, it followed from this, that the 
South should demand from the nation new concessions 
in respect to this social institution. It naturally and 
unavoidably desired and asked that the nation gener- 
ally should not stand in opposition to its views and 
plans. If it did so, it would be in their way, and would 
be constantly condemning them, if it did not more 
actively oppose them. The South, therefore, demand- 
ed that there should be no legislation of Congress 
against slavery, but as much as it could possibly secure 
in its behalf; and that a person should be almost inel- 
igible to Congress, or any important office under the 
General Government, if he was opposed to human 
bondage. Finally, it demanded the restraint of the 
expression of an opinion against slavery, and wished 
to have the power to prevent even the holding of 
such an opinion. It quietly or openly set at nought all 
provisions of the Constitution, and all power of the 
General Government, for protecting those among them- 
selves who held and expressed opinions adverse to 
their favorite domestic institution. 

There was nothing needed or desired by the South, 
to secure and establish its views, which it could not 
attain. It heid and used, at its own will, the entire 
official power and authority of the nation. When sla- 
very was involved, there was no North, and no nation 
except the South, under all ordinary circumstances. 



On retiring from Congress in 1858, Mr. Stephens stated, 
that he did so, " because he was not needed, because 
the South had carried every point in the long debate 
with the North, and because its future supremacy in 
the Union was absolutely assured by the decision of 
the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case." It had 
success in its aims, and it was hardened yet more, and 
became more fixed in its plans, and more exacting in 
its requirements, and more confident that it should 
gain an unquestioned or unassailable predominance in 
the nation. 

But at length the South found an obstacle in its way. 
Senator Douglass, who was the leader in one of the last 
steps taken to concede everything to the slaveholders 
of the nation, defended his action on the plea that the 
Missouri Compromise was in theory or principle un- 
democratic, and no restriction should be placed on the 
settlers of a territory, if they but formed it into a 
State which had a republican government. The South 
wanted more than this ; but he could go no further. 
He therefore became an object of deep personal en- 
mity to the leading Southern men. They determined 
. that they would not accept him as their candidate for 
the Presidency in 1860 ; while his friends were equally 
determined that no one else should receive the regular 
Democratic nomination. When the Convention of this 
political party met at Charleston, it was well known 
that a division would almost surely give the Presidency 
to the Republicans. But the South foresaw, in the re- 
jection of Mr. Douglas as the candidate of the Demo- 
cratic party, either his defeat, and their triumph ; or 
the opportunity, in the success of the Republicans, to 
arouse the South to rebellion, which should at least 
2 



10 

make them independent, if it did not put in their 
hands, by some revolution, the reins of power at Wash- 
ington and over the entire country. 

It took its choice, divided the party, and gave the 
election to the Republicans. It again had its own way, 
and thus secured one of its objects — the unity of the 
Southern States in a revolt against the Government. 
The South's determined pursuit of its purpose, to rule 
or ruin, hardened it to take this extreme step, expect- 
ing another victory from it, and willing to take such 
risks, and pay such a price, to protect and perpetuate 
slavery. 

Then came another step in the process of hardening 
itself to pursue its object. It was claimed even at the 
South, by Mr. Stephens and others, that no overt act 
of wrong had yet been done to that portion of the 
Union by the rest, or by the Government. It had 
guarantees in the Republican platform, and the Inaugu- 
ral address of Mr. Lincoln, that none would be done. 
But if these were not sufficient, it had them, beyond all 
question, in the character of the Supreme Court, and 
the opposition of the majority of both houses of Con- 
gress to those political views of the President which 
they feared. They soon received, besides, from the 
new Congress, Mr. Corwin's proposed amendment to 
the Constitution which expressly and forever prohibi- 
ted the change of the domestic institutions of any 
State without its own consent. Mr. Everett stated, in 
May 1861, in a speech at Roxbury, that, in case all this 
failed to retain the South in the Union, and they ab- 
stained from further aggression, he understood the pro- 
gramme of the Administration to have been to allow 



11 



the revolting States to go in peace. And of such a policy 
he himself approved. 

Surely all this might have made men hesitate before 
lighting the fires of civil war. But no. It seemed 
best to risk all in the hope that slavery might gain 
every thing, and liberty lose every thing. " The Dis- 
unionists would not wait for overt acts," again Mr. 
Everett said, " because they knew none could or would 
be committed." " The leaders were determined not 
to be satisfied." They drew or forced one State after 
another into secession. They chose to attack a fort, 
and the flag of the Union, when they knew that the 
garrison must evacuate that fort in a few days peaceably 
or else starve. And then they asserted that the form 
of our Government was wrong, because it rejected sla- 
very, and claimed liberty and equal rights for all men ; 
and soon they were ready to condemn and reject even 
the principle of government by the majority of the 
nation. The mass of the people soon followed their 
leaders in these extreme views. They were all harden- 
ing themselves to go further and further for their fa- 
vorite institution and form of society. And as God's 
providence permitted their plans to succeed, so far 
God too hardened them. 

They were able to commence actual warfare against 
the Government. As their phrase was, « The Southern 
heart was fired." Had they been unable to enlist the 
people in actual warfare, or been at once met by 
overwhelming forces of the Government, the revolt 
might soon have been suppressed, and every thing left 
as it was, for the present. But instead, they had pro- 
vided too well, and our Government too poorly, to 
meet the emergency. They were hardened, and em- 



12 

boldened to carry on the contest. Our Government 
could not directly attack them. Its first serious at- 
tack, made nearly three months after the threat to raise 
the flag of Secession on the National Capitol, and made 
almost within sight of Washington, met with a repulse. 
Thus matters went on, constantly favoring them. 
They were encouraged and hardened again. We put 
the war on the footing of reducing them to subjection 
to the National Government, without any interference 
with slavery as an institution. This was demanded by 
the majority of the North, and affirmed by Govern- 
ment, and its military officers. The success of the 
South in its resistance enabled it to oppose us effectu- 
ally, while carrying on the contest on this ground. It 
would not submit, and it could not be conquered. It 
was not willing to yield, when it could have saved that 
which was its great object in the war. It was once 
more hardened. Its success hardened it to persist in 
the contest. Its hope was to triumph, and not merely 
retain its slaves in bondage, but govern the Union, 
or establish another government on a basis of aristo- 
cratic rule. 

The success which thus encouraged the' South, com- 
pelled the nation to take a new position. It first con- 
quered its own wishes, plans, established policy ; first 
conquered itself in respect to the contest. War left it 
under no political obligations to any man, or govern- 
ment, or institution of the South, which had cast off 
its authority, and was contending with arms against it. 
The people said, We give it up ; slavery shall no 
longer be sacred; we will contend now to save the 
nation alone ; and because slavery is in our way it 
must go, 



13 



The means, the power, the skill, the spirit of the 
South hardened it to continue the contest until we 
were compelled to put it in this form ; so that all that 
was peculiar and precious to the rebels, and wrong to 
man and liberty, should go down together with them, 
if they were vanquished. 

But they were not. The nation took this stand over 
two years ago. The rebels held out. We could not 
conquer them. It seemed like their success. It was 
God hardening their hearts. This measure of success 
was required to tax to the extreme and wear out their 
strength, to inflict on all their territory the dire results 
of w.ar, and to bring them to such a point that when 
defeat came it should crush them, and leave them with- 
out means of recovery, or of renewing the contest. A 
defeat at another stage would have left their Com- 
mander-in-Chief where he could have made terms in 
surrendering, instead of being compelled to take such 
as his antagonist chose to give him. 

It would seem as if their spirit, their wishes, their 
policy, and their success had drawn our enemies on to 
make the plainest statement of their object, and the 
fullest exhibition of their character and their feelings, 
and had brought them where they had to place every 
thing at hazard at once. Then, as when Pharaoh and 
his host were in the midst of the Red Sea, the waters 
flowed over them, and covered them with a complete, 
irreparable ruin. 

Their hearts were set upon the triumph of those prin- 
ciples which they avowed. Wrong, they yet schooled 
themselves to believe them right. God then seemed 
to put it in their power to carry out their plans. Ev- 
ery obstacle seemed to fall before them; every thing 



14 

to favor their success. But the end proves that an- 
other Hand was controlling matters, while they seemed 
to be attaining their aims, and we seemed to be labor- 
ing almost uselessly to prevent them. They have been 
encouraged, emboldened, hardened, only to ensure their 
utter vanquishment. They lose what they had before 
the war, what they might have had at many stages of 
the war, what they could have secured even before 
they struck the last blow. To surrender on our terms 
was all they left themselves, or God left them. Think, 
for a moment, of their present position, along with the 
one they had. Then think what a fearful price they 
have for four years been paying to receive this, alone, 
as all that they have thus purchased for themselves. 

III. Let us then look at the results ivhich the Secession- 
ists notv find themselves compelled to accept. 

We can mention nothing else which makes it so evi- 
dent that the hand of God has controlled the whole 
affair ; and that they have been hardened only to lead 
them on to their own defeat and ruin. 

They have constantly been asking us to let them 
have their own way. In a certain sense, we have done 
so from the beginning, although we have not let them 
alone. The matter has been mainly in their hands, 
^ince they ceased to govern the nation in Congress. 
They led us out into the field of conflict, and have 
given affairs their form far more than we have done. 
They secured the election which was the pretence for 
secession ; they seceded ; they attacked our forces ; 
they threatened us with subjugation ; they generally 
selected our battle-fields ; they protracted the war ; 
they shaped the plan and objects of the war; they put 



15 

every thing of theirs at stake on the battle-field. And 
now that they are beaten, what have they accomplish- 
ed ? Where have they left matters ? 

As the}'' look around to-day, they do not find at 
Washington, or in the nation, what their leaders left 
when they departed from the Capitol. Instead of the 
election of a President who represented a party in fa- 
vor of not extending slavery, but still having only the 
power of a minority in Congress, they find a President 
with the majority of Congress on his side in thorough 
opposition to slavery, and the States voting to amend 
the Constitution so as to exclude bondage from among 
us forever. Instead of the little which the triumphant 
party avowed and aimed at four years ago respecting 
slavery, they find what it had no purpose, nor hope of 
accomplishing, or seeing accomplished, for human free- 
dom. Instead of a minority opposed to making any 
new slave States, they find the mass of the nation de- 
termined that there shall henceforth be no men held 
in bondage among us. Instead of Constitutional guar- 
antees of the unmolested retention of servitude in any 
State where it exists, as long as that State may choose, 
they find the manumission of every slave in the revolt- 
ed States, with the promise of the protection of his 
freedom by the General Government. Instead of the 
nation being permitted to bring them back to allegi- 
ance in its way, without destroying slavery, they find 
it compelled to couple this with its contest to subdue 
their revolt. Instead of gaining the continuance, and 
security, and extension of servitude, with the other 
objects at which they aimed, they find that they have 
lost all they possessed in respect to slavery, together 
with the shame of defeat, their land filled with the 



16 

graves of the flower of their young men, their fields 
and homes desolated, and themselves waiting on the 
ruler rejected by them and loaded with every vile epi- 
thet, to ask him to be lenient and merciful. Were not 
their crimes so great, then their failure so complete, 
and their position so helpless and abject would move 
our pity. But now they make us think chiefly of God 
hardening men, who will persist in wickedness, until 
they are " filled with their own ways," and " their 
own iniquities correct " them. 

Again, when they look for the men who are trium- 
phant in their fall, those who attract their notice can- 
not be the mass of the nation, nor the President, nor 
that political party which elected him, but, first and 
most, the men whom they hated before all others, and 
whose principles they lacked words to mark with such 
abhorrence as they felt for them. It must embitter 
the extreme bitterness of their defeat, when they see 
that their course has given a complete triumph to the 
most radical and uncompromising abolitionists of the 
nation. Of all strange things of our day, it seems the 
strangest, that Davis, and Mason, and Toombs, and 
Rhett, that South Carolina and Mississippi, should have 
effected more than all the abolitionists of the nation 
tog-ether, to convert the nation to the abolition and 
destruction of slavery, and to cover with honor the 
names of Sumner, Greeley, and Garrison, and place 
Massachusetts, on account of her vigorous and success- 
ful contests with the enemies of liberty, first, in the 
field of discussion, and then, on the field of battle, in 
a higher rank of glory than she ever could have at- 
tained had it not been for the present issue of the mad 
conflict forced upon us by slaveholders to advance the 



17 

interests of slavery and increase its power. But the fin- 
ishing stroke to the mortification of the rebels must 
have been when the negro soldiers entered with triumph 
into Charleston and Richmond, as their masters and 
oppressors were compelled to flee from those cities. 
God took the foolish things, the weak, the base, the 
despised, those even which are not, to confound the 
mighty. 

Another result is, the fresh impression made, that in 
God's government of the world, He follows human in- 
iquity with present punishment. 

Men know that oppression is wrong, but it existed 
here on so large a scale, and had existed so long, and 
was so interwoven with our body politic, that it seemed 
as if it must remain and be overlooked, not only by 
men, but even by God. But when its end has come 
through means which were first threatened, and then 
employed, in order to extort from the nation every 
thing its friends desired for its security; when the 
step which has resulted in its overthrow was taken by 
its own friends ; when the nation was compelled to 
contend against it and its advocates, to preserve its 
own life ; when the course of the conflict has been 
such as to sorely punish our entire nation ; when the 
South has had success, and we defeats, which have 
drawn the South to its own ruin, as well as that of 
slavery ; when we know that neither would have un- 
dertaken the conflict, either for assault or defence, had 
its magnitude been foreseen ; and when we see that its 
cost has been almost as many men as there were men- 
slaves in bondage, and about as much treasure as it 
would have required to buy the freedom of them all ; 
when we consider all this, we cannot help feeling that 



18 

the hand of God is here, while His voice says, " Be still 
and know that I am God ;" " The wrath of man shall 
praise Me." 

But we feel this the more deeply, the more we con- 
sider the result — who are they who are ruined, and 
what in contrast are their principles to whom the tri- 
umph is given. The oppressor of man, he who sneered 
at human rights, and reviled the principles of the Gos- 
pel, is not the victor at the end. Through many a day 
of darkness, and discouragement, and anxiety the nation 
has passed. It dreaded war, and preferred any thing 
instead, excepting national ruin, social anarchy, and 
unfaithfulness to the charge of free government which 
God had committed to it. But, for a long time, fraud, 
oppression, iniquity, treason, seemed to have the prov- 
idence of God favoring them. All our exertions seem- 
ed to be baffled, our prayers unanswered, our justifi- 
cations of ourselves met only by such results as con- 
tradicted them. Men's hearts, again and again, failed 
them for fear ; but we dared not abandon the contest, 
even when we had little to rest on excepting confidence 
that we were doing our duty, and that the principles of 
God's government were on our side, even if at the time 
his dealings appeared adverse to us. 

And now the simple faith of pious men and women 
in a righteous God, who will not suffer iniquity to tri- 
umph in the end, sees its expectations realized. It is 
not because we are too good to be punished, but be- 
cause the fearful guilt of beginning this civil war does 
not rest on us, and because it does rest on those whom 
we had not wronged or oppressed, that God has cover- 
ed them with defeat. Because they contended not for 
freedom or right, but for oppression and iniquity, there- 



19 



fore now in the end " God is known by the judgment 
which he executeth ;" and men are made to feel that 
He frowns on wickedness, and that He crushes those 
who array themselves against Him, and His Anointed, 
and the -principles of right which He has declared in 
the Gospel of His Son. 

In their defeat, our enemies have also furnished the 
world with another most impressive illustration of the 
power of a single right idea, and of the weakness of 
every thing before it. 

We have for years had under discussion the ques- 
tion of human freedom. Most of us have believed in it, 
and we generally have tried to shift upon the South 
the guilt of opposing or denying it. It came to us, 
out of the Word of God, from our fathers. It has 
kept its hold among us, but has encountered an in- 
creasing and bitter opposition at the South. At length 
Southerners made the open avowal of hostility to the 
conviction that freedom is a man's right ; and they set 
themselves to oppose it, and expel it from among us. 
All social power was used against it. The influence of 
the National Government was also in the main secured. 
When all means had been in vain employed within 
the Union, then a civil war was commenced to contend 
against it more effectually. 

The South not only denied such a human right 
openly, but said, in substance, that we should not hold 
such an opinion ; it would prohibit its existence, or 
crush it out among us, and banish it from among men. 
The simple, plain, unwarlike, holy idea stood, and bore 
the attack. Every force which could be employed has 
for years beaten against it, It has, however, not taken 
up arms. When its friends contended against its ene- 



20 

mies, it did not ask them to fight for it ; they only de- 
fended themselves. All the time, through all the con- 
flict, it has stood and grown; its roots have spread 
under ground, its stock has become firmer and taller, 
its branches have reached out further and further. By 
all their eiforts its enemies have only exhausted and 
ruined themselves, while their exertions have given 
it new vigor. The simple, unarmed idea has conquer- 
ed. Monarchs who would not yield to it had already 
fallen before it ; governments had been overthrown, 
which would not admit its claims ; and now a nation 
has warred against it, in turn like all the rest, to be 
worsted in the conflict. 

The strength of God is given to those ideas, those 
principles of right, which He has established. Man 
has no power which can overcome them, although they 
never fight, but go on their way peaceably, except 
when men make war on them. The sentiment of hu- 
man freedom has at last taken its seat with the nation, 
in the chariot with which it rides to victory. Under 
the government of man's Redeemer, only in its com- 
pany could we conquer. 

Such are the things which we must consider at the 
present time. Each day forces them on our thoughts. 
This is not our work. This is not our plan. We 
shunned civil war, we dreaded it as a calamity. It 
was for our enemies to bring it on us. It is their 
work. They began it, they persisted in it, they gave 
it its form and character. We have suffered with them. 
But God's hand has been in it all. He meant to pun- 
ish us, but He meant also to let them harden themselves, 
and devise plans, and work them out to their ruin, es- 
pecially in that point for which they began the con- 



21 

test And, with their failure to maintain and extend 
human bondage, they give us its universal overthrow 
and its destruction, as an institute of the civilized 

"tow we must praise Him, for He has not suffered us 
to be destroyed. He has strengthened us for all that 
He has demanded of us, and has given ns the victory 
lith the ruin and termination of the oppression winch 
Z been our reproach among the nations of the earth 
and the constant source of alienation, variance and 
danger among ourselves. 

The work is done, and we are glad of it It has 
heen done in God's way and not ours and to His name 
Kp flip nraise On our enemies we look and say, u, 
rle Chast destroyed thyself!" To .he throne 
of God we turn, and bowing, cry, « Verily, Thou art 
.God who judgest in the "*?'**£%£ 
are a great deep !" Let us thank Him, let us tear 
H m!let us seek to be at peace with Him ; and let us 
Wealing with those we have vanquished, and set- 
togour national affairs, carefully consult His will, 
both in measuring out justice, and exercising mercy 
So < God, even our own God, shall bless us ; God 
"hall bles ns ; and all the ends of the earth shall fear 



Him." 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



012 028 363 7 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




Hollinger 

pH8.5 

Mill Run F3-1955 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




012 028 363 7 £ 

*7— 



Hollinger 

pH8.5 

Mill Run F3-1955 



